The Old World Mindset: Be a Grosvenor, Not a Vanderbilt
The Old World Mindset: Be a Grosvenor, Not a Vanderbilt
Last for a Thousand Years, Or Go from Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in Three Generations?
In the middle of May, I graduated from law school. Sitting through the commencement ceremony, I listened to the two speakers ramble on about pointless trivialities they thought were profound (one even encouraged the listening graduates to ‘be like goldfish’) and considered what should be said in such a ceremony. What ought young professionals think about as they enter a world that, however pleasant many aspects of it may be, is quite obviously decaying, largely because few now plant forests they will never see but in the shade of which their great-grandchildren will relax?1
The obvious answer is that those in positions of power and responsibility today must learn to be Grosvenors rather than Vanderbilts. That is, they should be taught to create traditions and legacies that not only last but grow stronger over a millennium rather than fade away in three generations. In other words, the young must be inculcated in the “old world mindset” of preserving traditions over centuries rather than the “new world mindset” of viewing every dollar as an avenue toward meaningless consumption.
In addition to being inspired by commencement, this article was inspired by two articles written by Johann Kurtz on his substack, Becoming Noble, and on conversations I have had with him about those articles and the message within them. I highly recommend you read his article on why wealth should be left to its rightful heirs, not charities, and why children must be raised to be worthy of such wealth.
Listen to the audio version of this article here:
Grosvenors and Vanderbilts: Two Very Different Ways of Treating Wealth, and of Viewing Civilization
The Vanderbilt Fortune: Quickly Earned, Quickly Spent
While Vanderbilt University still exists and the Biltmore remains standing as a playground and photo background for those in the Asheville area, the once-titanic fortune of Cornelius Vanderbilt is now spent. In fact, it was mostly gone a century ago, vaporized like the cigars and cigarettes wrapped in $100 bills the Vanderbilt heirs smoked.2
What happened? For one, the death of his competent son, George Washington Vanderbilt II, in the War Between the States was a grievous blow to the family’s future fortunes. However, at a higher level, the larger problem that led to the family going from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three(ish) generations was that there was no greater, animating legend behind the family’s wealth and status. Cornelius was a genius businessman whose talents left a legacy in the form of America’s rail infrastructure, but that genius wasn’t passed down to the next generation. Only the wealth was, and with that wealth came no legend of anything greater, no tales of knights from long ago or traditions that lasted a generation, just shares in a company the heirs were unfit to manage.
Nor was there a myth behind the house of Vanderbilt, quite unlike the Duke of Marlborough, whose estate and legacy William Vanderbilt helped preserve through the marriage of his daughter Conseulo to “Sonny” Spencer-Churchill.3 There were no great battles won like the first duke’s triumphs at Blenheim, Ramilies, and Malplaquet; Cornelius made a fortune in the war, but he didn’t fight in it. There was no great home and estate to pass through generations; the Biltmore was a manor home without a real manor for the family to remain lords of through the generations.
Nor was there even a sense of legacy. the family, like all great Gilded Age families, contributed heavily to charity, but while Vanderbilt University remains, the family’s fortune is now gone because it wasn’t stewarded. Instead, it was spent. Cigars were smoked, brandy quaffed, and mansions erected, and with those expenditures went the fortune.
Now, the family is an axiomatic lesson in tales of great wealth squandered,4 and nary a Vanderbilt remains wealthy. As recorded in Arthur T. Vanderbilt II's 1989 book, Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt, “Within thirty years after the death of the Commodore Vanderbilt in 1877, no member of his family was among the richest people in the United States…. When 120 of the Commodore’s descendants gathered at Vanderbilt University in 1973 for the first family reunion, there was not a millionaire among them.”5
That Vanderbilt legacy stands in stark contrast to the British Aristocracy, which remains wealthy and powerful6 despite decades of hostile government policy, the great sacrifices they made in the Great War, and the Industrial Revolution changing the nature of from where wealth comes. In fact, the descendant of the wealthiest duke of the Victorian Age, Hugh Lupus Grosvenor,7 remains the wealthiest duke of today.8
The Grosvenors of Eaton
When William the Conqueror sailed across the Channel, landed at Pevensey, and defeated Harold at Hastings, he did so along a coterie of his Norman knights and retainers. Among them were his huntsman and the 1st Earl of Chester, Hugh le Grosveneur, and Hugh’s nephew Gilbert le Grosveneur, both of whom settled in Cheshire with wealth granted them by William.
Fast forward eight centuries to the third Marquess and First Duke of Westminster, his grace Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, so named after his distant ancestor, through Gilbert, the first Earl.9 Then, nearly a millennium after the Conquest, the Grosvenor family remained seated at Eaton Hall in Cheshire. By then, thanks to an 18th-century marriage to Mary Davies that granted them Mayfair and Belgravia, the then-farms and now-posh neighborhoods of London, the Grosvenors were the wealthiest family in the United Kingdom. They’d made it through the tyranny and wars of the Plantaganets, the anarchy of the War of the Roses, the brutality of the Civil War (in which they prudently remained neutral),10 the profligacy of the Georgian Era, and the agricultural depression in the 1840s.
Flash forward a century and a half more to today, and the current Duke of Westminster, also named Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, is the wealthiest duke in the UK, will have the Prince of Wales as an usher at his wedding, and will live in Cheshire, as his family has for a thousand years.11 Between the first and seventh (current) duke, the family survived the agricultural depression of the 1880s and 90s, the death duties and the Reform Bill, the Great War and World War II, the confiscatory taxes of the 60s and 70s, and all the financial crashes between then and now.
And while the startling wealth of the Grosvenors, a fortune now reconned as being at least £10.127 billion, makes them the best example of aristocratic permanence, other families survived the ages as well. Amongst those who came across with William, the Fitzwilliams have faded from their former glory but remain wealthy, the Manners family (Dukes of Rutland) remain in possession of Belvoir Castle and the surrounding estate and have preserved the fox-hunting tradition for which their ancestors and the Belvoir hounds were famous, the Percys remain some of the largest landowners in the land and owners of Alnwick Castle, and the Sutherland-Leveson-Gower family has been one of the most influential in England.
How? Well, they recognized that the purpose of a title and an estate is to pass those honors and responsibilities onto the next generation. As Lord Grantham puts it in Downton Abbey when looking at Highclere Castle, preserving it for the next generation is his “life’s work.”12
Edmund Burke, explaining that impulse, noted that the landed interest is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to come, saying, “As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles.”13
Similarly, Burke argued in Reflections on the Revolution in France, “But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation - and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.”
Similarly, as Randolph Churchill wrote in Winston S. Churchill: Young Statesman, 1901–1914, “It is one of the merits of primogeniture that the money and amenities of a great family can be made available to gifted but impoverished members of a cadet branch.” In other words, one must not sell the family stock to buy cigars nor mortgage the familial lands to go on a Carnival cruise. The purpose of wealth is to preserve the same advantages for future generations and branches of the family, not to spend down the capital on pleasure.
Further, what the old families show is that wealth need not corrupt. The children of the wealthy are now regarded as irresponsible, free-spending trust fund babies that do little of note and spend down the capital of the family fortune rather than preserving and expanding it for future generations. They act like the Vanderbilts. But that need not be the case, and often, amongst the old Norman families that control much of the UK’s wealth even today, it’s not. Though there are a few bad apples, like the formerly drug-addicted current Duke of Marlborough and the profligate dukes and earls of the Georgian days, generally the families have survived, if occasionally in somewhat straightened circumstances. The current Duke of Westminster, for example, inherited billions when just 25 years old,14 yet has remained out of the scandal pages and seems to be a responsible steward of his family’s wealth and position.15
Still further, as Matthew Bond & Julien Morton record in Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth, it is the old, landed families that have managed to hold onto their wealth to the present day, while the capitalist families made earls by Victoria and Edward VII have, by now, largely lost that wealth.16 Family tradition and understanding that what one inherits ought to be preserved rather than spent is a powerful force. The Vanderbilts are gone. The commercial earls have lost their fortunes. But, thanks to prudence and a desire to preserve in the name of family tradition, the old chivalry holds on. The Percys, FitzWilliams, Manners, and Grosvenors all remain wealthy and influential.
Why? To put it simply, if not eloquently, they survived because they were tied to something. Even if though they used equities and bonds to boost their wealth from the late 19th century on and even when they occasionally married an American heiress to shore up the family’s financial position, they largely remained committed to their familial estates and the tradition that came with them. Their main wealth was with the land and its cultivators, and so they have remained rooted in the traditions of that land and, unable to sell it off except in large blocks, largely kept the capital intact and continue to benefit from the revenue it generates. As always, there are exceptions. But largely, they remained permanent in their wealth and power because of the permanence of their form of capital, land, and the family traditions that tied them to it.
For a more thorough discussion as to the “why” behind that permanence, read “Raising children worthy of empires” by Johann Kurtz.
The Lesson to be Learned, and How It Applies to Us
As you’re likely muttering to yourself by now, America has no hereditary titles, nor does it have the remnants of a Norman nobility. Here we have few landed estates at all, much less the 100,000+ acre estates of the great families or castles like Alnwich and Belvoir passed on for hundreds of years. What extremely wealthy men of note we have are commercial oligarchs of the Vanderbilt mold, and so their fortunes largely dissipate in a few generations.
But, for one, the lesson does apply on a smaller scale. The landed families in England have survived to the present day because they were rooted to the soil and devoted to passing it on; that sort of mindset must be inculcated in children if family values and legacy is to be passed on, and it does seem that the form of capital matters. Land, in terms of familial permanence, seems to be far superior to stock.
More importantly and broadly applicable, the lesson is civilizational. Today we stand amongst the ruins of a failing culture. Christianity is more or less dead as a religion, with few churchgoers having the fire of the faith burning inside them in the way the Crusaders burned with belief. Anglo-Saxon values, from free speech to the sanctity of property rights, are dying under the burdensome weight of Bioleninist politics,17 mass migration from the Third World and the third world values of those from there, and increasingly socialist economic policies. Our architecture is largely modernist monstrosities, the average person is quite unhealthy, and people generally are so depressed and unwilling to think about the future that fertility is an increasingly pressing problem.
But though those issues are pressing, they are survivable for those with the right values who are willing to pass their values on. As discussed above, the Grosvenors and other families made it through every crisis of the past millennium. Civil wars, financial crashes and crises, inflation, tyrants, socialism, none of it ended them. Some luck was involved, of course; more than a few earldoms and the Bedford Estate of the Dukes of Bedford were nearly done in by the socialist tax policies of post-WWII Britain.18
Still, for those with a bit of luck or the prudence to plan around death duties, everything was survivable, and the proof that it was lies with the Percy and Grosvenor families and their massive wealth. They and their fortunes survived far more dangerous threats than Kamala Harris and AOC; Cromwell, for example, was a good bit more competent than anyone now alive, and even Attlee would show the current politicians to be the fools they are. That’s not to say our threats aren’t pressing. They are. But they can be overcome.
However, to be overcome, they must be recognized, and the values necessary to combat them must be passed on to the next generation. Burke’s observation that “Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn” means not just that the land and wealth passed on from generations past must be passed on to future generations but that the values of those past generations must be passed on as well. Hierarchy, hard work, prudence, chivalry, etc., are all the values of the old world and not the values of today, where “move fast and break things” is much more the rule and Chesterton’s fence exists only to be obliterated. But they are the values that defeated those threats that could have ended the Norman nobility centuries ago; dukes remain dukes because they act like dukes, not Google.
Finally, the concept of stewardship must return. One of the problems with a largely meritocratic, individualistic, and capitalistic society is there is little sense of what was passed on from before and what should be passed on to the next. That’s true of families and society, but it must be considered; we stand on the shoulders of giants in all that we do and must preserve those heights for future generations; the ground on which we metaphorically stand, everything from Western values to the opportunity to go to school rather than working to help feed the family, is an advantage that comes thanks to generations past. Those advantages aren’t to be used and abused, as they have been for much of the second half of the twentieth century and all of this century,19 but rather cultivated and preserved for the future.
Some damage to an estate can be incurred and moved on despite. But only so much; as the seventh Duke of Bedford noted, a great estate can survive two profligate heirs, but not three. At the point that it has been drawn down for two, the third must work hard first to preserve and then restore it to its former glory. Thanks to him, the Russell family was, by his death in the 1870s, once again on sure financial footing and able to weather significant death duties in the twentieth century.
That same lesson applies to civilizations. The West has now been abused by profligate heirs for generations. The wealth of the Industrial Revolution was wasted on World Wars, entitlements and welfare spending, tolerance of crime and other anti-civilizational activity, and on replacing God with materialism. But now that wealth is running dry and the land has been sold off, the roof needs repairing and the farms need capital improvement to continue functioning if we are to survive. That’s a bad place in which to be, though it is likely still recoverable.
But for the situation to be recovered, we must move on from profligacy and learn to be Grosvenors rather than Vanderbilts, to build families and values that last for a thousand years rather than whither away after just a few decades.
For further reading, I encourage reading Victorian Duke: The Life of Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, First Duke of Westminster by Gervas Huxley, The Dukes: Origins, Ennoblement and History of 26 Families by Brian Masters, A Great Agricultural Estate by the Duke of Bedford, Lady Elizabeth and the Grosvenors Life in a Whig Family 1822-1839 by Gervas Huxley, Aristocratic Enterprise: The Fitzwilliam Industrial Undertakings, 1795-1857 by Graham Mee, The Growth of Victorian London by Olsen, The Aristocracy in England, 1660-1914 by J. V. Beckett, 1913: In Search of The World before the Great War by Charles Emmerson, and The Landowners by Douglas Southerland
See, Victorian Duke: The Life of Hugh Lupus Grosvenor, First Duke of Westminster by Gervas Huxley
See, the chapter on the Bedford Estate in The Dukes: Origins, Ennoblement and History of 26 Families by Brian Masters